Uncertainty and the Environment

Richard A. Young

"This book is concerned with the need to deal adequately with uncertainty in environmental decision making. The author advances a critique of the use of traditional models and then develops an alternative model of decision making under uncertainty, based on the work of George Shackle." "Richard Young forwards a critique of the conventional expected utility approach and, using an alternative conceptualisation of environmental uncertainty, contends that there are a number of different modes of uncertainty and that many environmental decisions are characterised by what is termed 'hard uncertainty'. The presence of hard uncertainty radically alters the way in which environmental uncertainty can be dealt with at both an epistemological and a practice level, and poses a number of problems for traditional decision making frameworks based on probability. The author goes on to apply the model...